Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5920

Chapter 5920: Infinite Nightmare! II

The Nightmare hung over the Legacy again, risen out of its own ash, and Noah looked at what was left beneath it.

Elsedimensions cracked down their middles. Snow stained grey. Halls with their roofs torn off and their gardens burned flat in the shape of a pale fire’s passing. Moriarty, lying broken against the side of a split mountain with his Immensity in rags around him.

A hundred old Immense Ones scattered across the snowfields like fallen leaves, their Immensities flickering, held to a quarter of themselves and then hammered lower. Theon, somewhere below, on his knees in the ash, trying to lift someone twice his size.

Above it all hung the nine, untouched and patiant, waiting for the next blow to land.

He had seen this before.

This Legacy was only the latest. Before it, there had been a city he had walked through. A world, a realm, a galaxy, a universe, a cosmos, a Qheel of Existence...an Observable Existence.

Regions that cracked because he stood in them, or because someone came for him there. Every time he arrived somewhere, sooner or later, that place began to break.

He was tired of watching it.

Here was the cycle: something arrives, something stronger follows, and the ground between them pays. The nine would strike again. The Nightmare would rise again. The Legacy would crack a little more each time, until there was nothing left to argue over but rubble and a sky full of shut gates.

So he would break the cycle.

Winning was out of reach. He could see clearly that this fight belonged to the nine, today and for a long time yet. His robe was burned to the knees. His crown was cracked. Aethon’s fire had nearly taken everything in one breath.

He would break it by making the ground bigger.

Noah lifted his head and looked at the nine.

"Existence is vast," he said.

His voice burned with Tyranny!

"Vaster than this Legacy. Vaster than your King’s dominion, or any King’s. There are more places in it than any one of us could visit in a thousand Ages, more things in it than any one of us could ever name. And yet here you stand, nine of you who could go anywhere at all, fighting over one small corner of it, because someone told you to. Because ruling it matters more to you than what it is."

Brunhild’s eyes narrowed.

"You want to rule so badly," Noah went on. "Then rule. But this corner is too small for it. You have already cracked it in half trying."

He let his gaze move across the broken Elsedimensions, the fallen Immense Ones, the grey snow. "So I will make it bigger. I will take this point of existence and connect it to another. Let it grow. Let it stretch. And when the dust settles, if you are still standing, we can speak about rulership again."

"Connect it..." Aethon said, very quietly, its pale flame still under its veil, "to what, you eerie tepid fucker?"

Noah’s answer came in another form.

He reached into his Nightmare.

It was everywhere around him, risen out of the ash, filling the region with obsidian and gold, and it was made of unwalked roads. Every Immense One who had fallen into it had brought their unlived lives with them. Every Immense One who had stared into the eye and answered wrongly had opened a crack into what they might have been. Thousands upon thousands of lost roads, lying loose in his Nightmare like threads in a basket.

And every one of those roads had a far end.

He had felt it when he faced the Butterfly That Wakes. Every road no one walks falls somewhere. It falls down. Down past the branches, down past the possible, into the place where nothing walks and nothing is walked. He had seen it once through a moth’s eye. He knew where it was.

Now he took those thousands of loose roads and laid them end to end.

His Infinite Quantum Dream turned beneath them, not dreaming forward this time, but downward. Probabilities opened under the Legacy like trapdoors. He passed over the likeliest road and looked for the least likely, the most forgotten, the most thoroughly abandoned, and he followed them all down at once, every thread in his Nightmare pointing the same way, until they gathered together into a single deep channel running beneath the Legacy, beneath the region, beneath the possible.

At the bottom of it, something grey and very old felt the pull.

|Your Nightmare has reached toward THE Fallow of Existence.|

|You are weaving its unwalked roads into a way down.|

|A door is forming between this region and THE Fallow.|

...!

The sky above the Legacy changed.

High over the torn veils, above the shut iron gates, in the place where the black eye had first opened, a shape began to form. It was a door. Or it was something a door would look like if it had grown instead of being built: an arch of grey, tangled roads, fallen and overgrown, curving up out of nothing and meeting at the top, and between them, a darkness that was anything but empty. It was full. Full of slow grey shapes and still air and the smell of very old leaves. Through it, faint and far, there was a sound like a forest breathing in its sleep.

Brunhild’s gates swung toward it.

Aethon’s flame brightened beneath its veil.

The door was forming carefully, slowly, as a careful door should. A threshold. A thing with edges. A thing that could be closed again.

Noah stepped into the sky.

He rose up through the fog and the ash with his burned robe trailing behind him and his cracked crown turning slowly over his head, until he hung in the air in front of the forming door, between the Legacy and the Fallow, between the nine and the grey dark. He looked into it for a moment. He felt the old cold breath of it on his face.

Then he raised both hands and took hold of its edges.

"No," he said magisterially!

"Not a door."

He broke it!

BOOM!

He tore the arch apart with his Nightmare and his Dream and every truth in his Shinjitsu, as a man tears open a seam in old cloth, and the grey roads that had been curving so carefully into a threshold split and frayed and burst outward, and the door was gone!

There was only an opening.

And the Fallow of Existence came through!

It bled into the sky above the Legacy in a slow vast spill, like ink poured into clear water.

Grey and endless, fallen roads unrolled across the heavens, tangeled and overgrown, branching and rebranching, some bright with the last light of choices left unmade, most dark and still. Grey trees of possibility leaned over the Legacy’s sky.

Grey mist rolled down through the gates. The smell of old leaves and cold earth and something sleeping fell over everything. Shapes moved in it, far off, too large to be seen whole.

The Fallow erupted across the skies of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, and kept coming.

The nine moved.

They moved together, as they had when they struck him, and Noah watched them do it, and saw again exactly how far above him they stood.

Brunhild threw up her gates. Thousands of them, white-lit, opening and slamming shut in a great curving wall across the sky between the Fallow and the army behind her. The bell-faced Unfathomable rang once, a single deep note, and the grey mist that reached that note simply stopped and fell.

The gate-chested giant spread his arms, and the bars across his chest opened, and whatever moved behind them came out and stood between the Fallow and the Ancients. The chain unwound across the sky and lashed the nearest fallen roads back. The woman of white stone sang, and her song held a whole stretch of the sky still.

And Aethon lifted its veil, and its small pale flame grew.

Quietly, steadily, it spread, a wall of clean smokeless fire laid across the sky in front of the Iron Psalm, and where the grey of the Fallow touched it, the grey burned. Fallen roads crumbled to nothing at its edge. The old dark curled back from it like a hand pulled from a stove.

Behind that wall of gates and bells and chains and fire, the Ancients and the Established and the Newly Risen and the Root Bearers of the Iron Psalm huddled in their broken ranks, protected, staring up at the grey sky with their halberds forgotten in their hands.

They were watching an unfathomable place pour into their own.

And the Fallow kept coming.

|You have steered an unthinkable action.THE Fallow of Existence is bleeding through.|

|It has reached the skies of THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.|

|It is bleeding into the Undefined Gaps.|

|Regions now connected: THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity. The Undefined Gaps. THE Fallow of Existence.|

|THE Totems of Dominion are being stretched apart. Their reach thins.|

|Warning: you have opened a way into a place that is unfathomably old.|

...!

"Let us mix and match existence," he said. "Why don’t we? This region and that one. The chosen and the unchosen. Your King’s little corner and a forest older than his name."

The gold eye and the obsidian eye were perfectly calm. "Rule over it, if you can."

BOOM!

|Existence here is expanding and will continue to do so.|

|A new region is forming where THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, the Undefined Gaps, and THE Fallow of Existence meet.|

|It is still growing.|

|THE Totems of Dominion cannot hold their grid. Their reach is torn.|

|The restriction on Immensity across the Legacy is breaking.|

...!